The Joker's Guide to Anarchy and Chaos
by Peter Madsen
Summary: An innocent man is abducted and taken hostage by the Joker in the wake of his escape from Arkham, but a case of Stockholm Syndrome causes a conflict within him over what he really is; a man, or a monster. Post TDK, possible spoilers. Discontinued.
1. A Chance Meeting

Preface: Hello, readers. Thanks for taking the time to read this. At first I just felt like trying to describe the Joker in words, but a million ideas started flying through my head, and I eventually managed to pull this one out of the chaos. My goal isn't to humanize the Joker, because I think that just sort of ruins the character, but just to explore the character and identify what it is that makes him 'The Joker'.

You may notice that this chapter is very short- just sort of an intro. Also, the formatting is all off because I don't have Word installed on this computer. I'll be writing the rest on my laptop, so this won't be a problem again.

--

_ The silhouetted figure slowly turned. Something pink shot from his mouth, the thick, stringy spit reflecting his abnormally short tongue in the moonlight. He advanced menacingly towards me, his knife glinting as he spun it in his gloved hand. The tongue shot out again, and quickly drew back into his mouth. _

_ "Why... hello there." he said, and something in his voice made me tremble; not from terror, but of some vague recognition. I could faintly make out his chin in the dark. It was an unnatural shade of white. _

_ "You look a bit... uh.. frightened..." he said, continuing towards me. I thought of running, but was disappointed when I realized was sitting._

_As he walked into the short corridor of light that surrounded me, a despicable smile plastered onto a face, that had been painted white some time long ago, so that the wrinkles on his forehead were now their original colors. The black makeup around his eyes made them appear even more sunken then they actually were. Worst, though, was the false smile painted in blood red around his mouth, culminating in the lumpy end of a scar that caught him in a perpetual smile. He barred his rotten, yellow teeth at me,and I saw the rest of him while diverting my eyes; a sweaty, unwashed group of yarn that danced and twirled around his head full of the debris from the explosion made up his hair, and a ratty, stained purple tuxedo with a striped green velvet vest covered his surely scarred and malformed body._

_I pulled myself backward, away from him while still on the ground, but he lunged at me and pulled my face close to his. I felt the cold metal of his switchblade in my mouth- soon the metallic taste of blood was making my mouth tingle, and I couldn't keep the fear from my eyes. His face, wrapped in a scowl, quickly melted into another terrible smile. He licked his lips again and, with quiet cackle, said,  
_

"**_Why so Serious?"_**


	2. A Brief Meander

I opened my eyes after a few minutes, but he was turned away from me. Still holding my arm with enough force to ensure my captivation, but his attention was elsewhere, giving me the perfect chance for an attempt to stop the inevitable.

I reached up with my left hand and grabbed his right. I carefully but quickly pulled the blade out of my mouth, and in less than a second he had turned back to me, mockingly frowned, and wrenched the blade from my grasp, slashing my palm in the process. I cringed from the pain and while my jaws strained against each other, he brought the knife up again and cut a small curve into my skin, from the edge of my mouth to the bottom of my cheek. Before I could bring my hand up to stop him, he did the same to the other side.

Then he let go of my arm, and I fell back on the ground. My hand shot to my mouth, smearing both the blood from my hand and my cheeks all around the lower half of my face.

"You know how I got these scars?" he asked, grinning, emphasizing the deep scars running away from his mouth. His tongue came out and wetted his cracked, dry lips again, and from some repressed portion of my brain came the desire to wrench the knife from his hands and cut the little pink slug right from his rotting mouth. I pushed the thought back, far back in my brain, where my conscious locked it away where it belonged.

" You see, I eh, I was doing some work for a known criminal, a real _wise guy_, you know, and uh, when he made a joke, y'see, you had to laugh, it was a… a _rule_ of his… and I made a, a tiny error, and…" he stopped and rustled up his hair. Little flurries of light debris sprinkled out, and each of the few, thick hairs became many as the sweat and blood that held them together came apart.

"So he says to his boys… he says 'why don't you go in back and show our new _friend _how to smile'." He paused for a few seconds. "And here we are."

He smiled deviously again, to which I responded with a steadfast glare. He grinned, more widely than any normal man could grin, and said "Oh, just terrible, what happened to your… smile." I glared harder, if that's possible.

"You shouldn't frown so much." he said, his expression turning from a subdued threat into overt hostility. He raised his knife above his head, and there it stood, poised to deliver a fatal blow, when a bullet ricocheted off the pile of stone debris I had crawled backwards against.

"C'mon, let's go grab a bite." My captor said, as if un-phased by the bullet that had just nearly taken half his brain out, and grabbed my arm once again, pulling me to my feet and through the dark in an instant. I could see in the dark during the brief moments when the muzzle flash of the disembodied gun firing at us lit up the dark; but none of them lasted quite long enough for me to make out what building we were in.

I heard an angry cry from behind as I stumbled through the dark, pulled forward by a seemingly unstoppable force; it sounded angry. Our pursuer had lost us, or run out of ammunition, or, as seemed more presumably the case, both.

Then came a short period of stumbling through the dark, debris-filled corridors of wherever we had been. Whatever had happened here had done a number on my memory, I guessed, because how I had come to be where I was wasn't immediately clear to me.

I had to shield my eyes against the streetlights when we came out to the sidewalk My abductor pulled me behind him, his knife held out in front of him as if to warn off any threat from the shrouds of darkness that floated into every niche and cranny where the light couldn't quite reach. There was a mini-van parked directly in front of us; he dragged me right past it, and stopped at a station wagon with enough space to maneuver out of the tiny space here against the curb. The meter here was out of time, and a small paper had been slipped between the windshield and the wiper.

"Let's go." He said, and broke the window into the back seat before looking at me. I had hoped he would just climb in, giving me the chance to just run, but he was smarter than that. I should have guessed that much already, but I hadn't exactly had a lot of time to think things over.

I hesitated before jamming my elbow into the mirror; it wasn't quite well thought out on my part. The window shattered, but the bone in my elbow felt as if it had done the same. I slowly, and painfully climbed into the driver's seat.

I don't have a completely clean past, I must admit, so starting the car without a set of keys wasn't easy, but not impossible. It took a good few seconds more than it would have taken a more practiced car burglar, but I got the car on, and soon we were speeding along the desolate streets of Gotham, myself driving, and my captor sitting on the windowsill of the car door, hanging halfway outside the car, a terrible grin across his lips, as if taunting an oncoming car, or some other obstruction to stand in his way.

It was only a few minutes before I realized that I had no clue where I was headed.


	3. Mealtime Conversation

I opened my mouth to talk, but all that came out was a gravelly, drowning gurgle. I coughed, and a bit of the blood I had swallowed shot from my mouth and stained the white shirt I wore under my jacket. I took the jacket off, because I did like it and wanted to keep it at least marginally clean.

"Where shou-" I started, sputtered for a moment, and continued. "-Should I be going?" I wasn't sure if he could hear me over the wind, so I listened carefully for any type of reply from him. I was about to ask again, when he flopped back into the car and shook the hair from his face, which was substantially lighter now that it wasn't as thickly adhered together with the blood and sweat of many a day's killing.

"I said, let's grab a bite." he said, sounding a bit annoyed. Then, leaning into the front seat from the back, grabbed the steering wheel from me and pulled us over into the oncoming lane. He cackled as a the car in front of us charged forward, blaring its horn, and only veering into the next lane at the last possible moment. I closed my eyes and took my foot off the gas, and his terrifying cackle didn't die until the car came to a stop.

I opened my eyes and saw we had parked, quite impeccably I might add. I turned around and saw my captor was gone; I tried opening the door, but the handle didn't catch. I tried again after unlocking it, and found a reassuring resistance this time as the door opened.

I stood up and looked around, trying to spot my captor. He wasn't close; I considered running away right there and then, but something told me to at least make sure I didn't run right into him. He was nowhere in sight, it seemed.

A ways down the block, on the edge of the park we had parked against, a man with long, dirty hair was standing in front of a hot dog stand, where a shirtless man with a crumb-filled moustache was shifting his eyes between the homeless man who stood silently in front of him and a small oil fryer on top of a stool next to him, from which emanated the sound and smell of bubbling grease.

I was stricken at the quality of the homeless man's jacket; it looked a lot like mine. It was the same kind, from the same store. I took a closer look and saw that it really was mine. My mind jumped around; It told me to grab my jacket from the car, even though I knew it wasn't there, then run away, while at the same time it kept me firmly planted to the spot as I watched the mustached hotdog vendor bicker at my knife-wielding abductor, who didn't reply, but slowly inched forward, his face obscured by his knotty, natty hair.

The vendor, at the end of his short-fuse, began to walk out from behind the hotdog cart to convince the loiterer to loiter someone else, but he was too deliberate at this; and he quickly got a face full of boiling grease, and fell to the ground screaming and clutching his now bright-red skin.

Now would be my last chance to run; but I already knew that I wouldn't make it very far without a knife in my back, and that the hotdog vendor, now shouting angrily and flailing his hands about the air, temporarily blinded, had suffered a fate far more generous than I mine. With a dejected sigh I resigned myself to being the psychopath's chauffer for a night. It was a far more sufferable option than being his next victim.

He got into the passenger seat this time, breaking the window and pulling himself through rather than waiting for me to unlock the door.

"This jacket is nice." He said, flicking a few small droplets of grease off the sleeve and onto the windshield, where they trailed down the glass and fell into the air-conditioner, filling the car with the smell of burnt potatoes. "What can I call you?" he asked me, sounding the most genuine I had heard from him all night.

"Whatever you like." I replied, keeping my gaze fixed firmly on the bumper of the SUV parked a few spaces ahead. I could see him smile from the corner of my eye as he wiped my blood from his knife and onto my jacket, wetting it in the remnants of the grease.

"How about…" he started, and went into what appeared to be deep thought. He must have remembered a particularly hilarious act of unspeakable violence, because he started laughing, and something in the back of my head started laughing with him.

"What about you?" I asked, trying to quiet the laughter in the back of my thoughts. He didn't respond audibly, but, as if out of nowhere, a card seemed to float down from the ceiling of the car. I grabbed it and flipped it, and the amnesia that had been muddling my thoughts since I had fallen into this nightmare allowed me a momentary reprieve.

Printed in small, black vertical letters on the left and right-hand sides of the card was a word that suddenly took a turn towards the ironic under the current circumstances.

**JOKER.**


	4. Your Place or Mine?

Something about the Joker made me chuckle. Maybe it was just the ridiculous nature of his persona. He seemed straight out of a comic book; he wasn't a good person turned bad, or a good person doing bad things; he was just bad.

"You look a bit tired." He said as we roared down the road at the Gotham unwritten speed limit of 80 mph. "I know a nice place…" he said, and trailed off as if he was about to give directions. He didn't.

"Are you going to kill me?" I asked, taking my eyes off the road for a split second, just in case I had reminded him that he hadn't finished the job earlier.

"I will," He replied, and then added, with another devilish smile, "if you let me." With a flash he produced his knife and I barely caught his hand in the downward motion of the strike. He quickly re-doubled his efforts and so I let go of the steering wheel. In the struggle we bumped it back in forth, and the car along with it, but the back-and-forth motions meant every time we turned the car one direction, before long we would turn it further the other way.

In my concentration on keeping the knife away from my head, I had been pushing down on the gas pedal, and we were now tearing down the streets of Gotham, though our exact location was a mystery to me. My tardiness in getting both my hands into the fight set me back quite a ways; the point of the blade was very near the tip of my nose, and my hands were in a way so that the very beginning of the knife was digging deeper and deeper into the flesh between my thumb and the rest of my hand.

Just as a small bead of sweat bridged the tiny gap between metal and flesh, some static object collided with the car (or, more accurately, the car collided with some static object), and we were both shaken up. I'm sure we would have both been flung through the windshield had we not been tangled up in a fight; unfortunately, this also had the unfortunate side effect of bashing my shin incredibly hard.

I stumbled from the wreckage, and, after a moment of trying to walk, fell over and rolled up my left pant leg. The skin was already beginning to bruise, but, after regaining my composure I was able to stand, and limp around, looking to see if any help had come. Of course, it had not; this was Gotham.

"What are you, ah, waiting for?" I heard from behind me, and wheeled around. The Joker licked his lips and pushed his hair back, exposing the creases in his forehead, where some of the white face paint had worn off. Then he turned around and disappeared in the darkness.

I wasn't sure if he was simply sneaking around so that he could get a fright out of me before he flayed me alive, or if he really was turning me loose. He sounded as if he wanted me to follow, but the sentence by itself was ambiguous. As attractive an offer my freedom was, some little mischievous thought in my mind wrestled with common sense and won.

My only justification for following him was my own hope that it might actually be less dangerous in the short term, and that as long as he had someone to terrorize, he would be garnering a lot of attention; though that wasn't always an easy thing to do in Gotham.

I walked in the direction he had headed, and I could see his silhouette a ways ahead of me, confirming I was headed the right way. I passed by a shop with a number of TVs piled in the window. The majority displayed just black and white static, barely illuminated the darkness on these run-down streets.

The working ones showed the news, where it showed the aerial view of a half-collapsed building. The title below the screen, just above the news ticker, said 'Arkham Collapses!' I couldn't hear the volume, but the subtitles explained, in a great many misspelled words, that it appeared the foundation of Arkham had been crumbling for years, and that many attempts had been made to relocate the prisoners to a more secure asylum, but just never had happened.

I was about to walk away, as the Joker's form was beginning to grow faint, but just as I walked on, the subtitles declared that the police had found a great many of Arkham's residents crushed, and didn't expect any had escaped.

I couldn't help but frown at the Gotham Police Department. I hoped that they were really just trying to keep the public calm; I wished we weren't in such narrow streets either, so I could see if they were calling for Batman. The Joker had already made it abundantly clear that Batman was the only thing standing between Gotham and an anarchic concrete jungle.

I was wrenched from my thoughts when ahead of me, the Joker's silhouette disappeared entirely into a tall building that looked out of place here. None of the buildings around were taller than 3 stories, but this one reached nearly the height of some of the skyscrapers deeper in the city.

It was still under construction, and in place of a proper door, I stood in front of a loose piece of metal laid against the doorframe, but stopped before I pushed it in. Who knew what was inside; a sick trap followed by hours of torture and a slow painful death, or perhaps I would unwittingly become an accessory to untold amounts of murders for which I would surely pay the price.

Slowly, I laid my hand on the cold metal, and with a small push, knocked it to the ground with a loud clang that echoed throughout the barren street I was on.


	5. Check, Please

_AN: Sorry for the 10-day wait. The family decided a spontaneous vacation was a good idea, and we managed to avoid all the hotels with wireless internet. I'll get back on a regular schedule soon, and I've got two chapters to hold you over until then._

I couldn't see very far into darkness inside the building. There was a small lamp that kept the entrance area illuminated, and I took it off its hook and held it in front of my body as I entered.

My shoes made soft, padded sounds as I stepped across the cement floor. At the back of the building was a metal ladder that ran up to the higher floors. I grabbed the first rung tightly after setting down the light, and shivered at its coolness.

I climbed for what felt like hours, until I had reached around the tenth story. I could hear some muttering, what sounded like an argument. I was able to see quite clearly thanks to the light reflected off the moon, and I was able to make out the faint shapes of two men standing near the edge of the building, where the wall would eventually be, though whether either of them was the Joker was a mystery to me.

As I approached them, I could hear the monorail in the distance, speeding along its track toward the building, and it covered the noise of the two figures' bickering for a second. I was finally able to hear them again when the monorail had passed by, and I saw that the two weren't arguing. One was arguing at the other, who stood facing out, towards the city, directly facing Wayne Tower. The purple coattails of his jacket hung low, and in his right hand he dangerously twirled a switchblade.

I tripped on an uneven section of cement, and the man who had been trying to argue turned to face me. He produced a pistol, and just as he leveled it with my chest, the Joker gave him a slight push backwards. He looked confused for a second, then his eyes widened before his face disappeared as he fell over the side of the building. He didn't scream until the very end, and then, he was silenced before he made much noise.

"Well, well," he said, walking towards me. "I wish all of my hostages were so cooperative. I wouldn't have to keep such a close… eye on them."

He gestured towards my eye with his knife, and for a moment I nervously wondered if he was going to lunge at my face in the hopes of taking my eye, but he kept himself restrained.

"I figure as long as you've got me, there's some other innocent person you're not dragging around trying to kill." I said, and hoped that that was my only real reason for following him.

"So you're not innocent?" he smiled. "That makes me feel _so_ much better. The guilt was tearing me apart." He swung his body around as if he was capable of feeling remorse, and was doing just that now.

"Not as innocent as most people." I replied. The bits of memories that had resurfaced in my mind didn't exactly fill me with pride. I couldn't recall any extreme violence, but there was quite a lot of burglary. I could only remember a small period of time, though, and then there was a long, gray area. Then a lot of darkness, and then waking up in the rubble outside of Arkham Asylum through to the present.

"That's quite an achievement in a city like Gotham." He said, and it seemed he was finally getting serious. Up until now he had been just blowing off steam, entertaining himself. Now it was time to plan, and that little growing goblin in the back of my head snickered in excitement.

"In a few minutes, we're going to have a …visitor." He said, and the way he grinned, I assumed our guest would be an arms dealer with a truck full of bombs. I asked anyway, on the off chance he really was being serious.

"Well, ah, he's an _old friend._ You probably know him, though. He, ah, he likes to glide around like a bird or, ah, I don't know, maybe…." He licked his lips and his eyes widened.

"A bat?"


	6. Fore Play

He just laughed. Or cackled, to be more accurate, a loud piercing shriek that would have summoned the Batman were he not assuredly already on the way. After a few moments of solid chuckling he stopped, and I heard a familiar ring; it was my cell-phone. I instinctively reached for my pocket, but it was empty; I listened and heard the ringing to my left. Against the wall was my jacket, which I donned to shield my frail body against the night's cold. In the inner pockets were my ringing phone, a half-empty pack of gum, and a knife. A feeling of nostalgia welled up inside me as my grip closed around it, but I ignored it and focused on the more pressing issue of the phone.

The name on the display read Kimberly, and I pictured in my head a tall brunette, slim and athletic, both modest and feisty at the same time, and a small sigh of exhilaration escaped my chapped lips before I could gasp it back in, and I inadvertently greeted Karen with the second half of my breath. It was an awkward start to the conversation, to say the least.

"Hello?" she said, audibly confused.

"H-… hey." I replied, trying to sound normal. It just came out betraying my exhaustion and confusion.

"Sid? I can't hear you." She said, and I realized that that was my name. I forgot entirely that I was on the phone, and lost myself in my mind, trying to figure out who I was. I remembered construction work. Steel beams and cranes and hammers and rivets. I vaguely remembered my childhood. But there was a gray period between those two periods, and another that extended from a few days prior until the night's festivities.

"Are you there? Sid?" I heard, and was brought back to reality.

"Hey… sorry about that. I'm working late." I said, hoping she would buy it. It was a few minutes before she responded, and for a moment I thought she didn't.

"Oh… okay. Could you call me next time? It's kind of embarrassing, sitting at a table for two by yourself all night." She said, plenty of sarcasm in her tone to cover up the disappointment..

"Yeah, I just… forgot. Sorry."

"I'll see you tomorrow." She said, and hung up before I could ask her what she meant by that.

Suddenly I became aware of a dark shadow in the corner of the 'room' (if you could call it that). It's shape didn't fit it's position. Then it moved. My heart jumped as the black thing crashed into me, rolled on the ground, then pounced at the Joker, who side-stepped him and stabbed at the shadow. It seemed to flow around it, never really touching it or being touched by it.

Then it lashed out again, and I could make out a fist against the dark night sky outside the building as it collided with the Joker's nose, followed by a sickening crunch as his nose ceased to function properly. He shrugged off the blow and laughed, then parried the next punch and swiped at the cloaked figure with his knife.

Suddenly the Shroud darted away from him, and I could finally make out the Batman's form, both elegant and deadly. Before I could get a good look he was moving again, tackling the Joker over the edge of the building, then soaring off into the night, holding the Joker's coat by the collar. Even as he grew smaller and smaller I could make out his struggle to free himself from the Batman's grasp, which would send him plummeting towards the ground and almost certain death.

My phone chimed at me, and I pulled it out, observing the text that said 'NEW TEXT MESSAGE'. I went to the inbox, and saw a message from and unknown number that read 'go back and check the glove compartment', followed by a smiley face.

Intrigued, I began the long climb back to the bottom of the construction site.


End file.
